Cilia and Flagella
Both cilia and flagella are constructed from microtubules, and both provide either
locomotion for the cells (e.g., sperm) or
move fluid past the cells (e.g., ciliated epithelial cells that line our air passages and move a film of mucus towards the throat).
Both cilia and flagella have the same basic structure. If the cell has
many short ones, we call them cilia or
only one or a few long ones, we call them flagella.
Each cilium (or flagellum) is made of
a cylindrical array of 9 evenly-spaced microtubules, each with a partial microtubule attached to it. This gives the structure a "figure 8" appearance when view in cross section.
2 single microtubules run up through the center of the bundle, completing the so-called "9+2" pattern.
The entire assembly is sheathed in a membrane that is simply an extension of the plasma membrane.
This electron micrograph (courtesy of Peter Satir) shows the 9+2 pattern of microtubules in a single cilium seen in cross section.

Motion of cilia and flagella is created by the microtubules sliding past one another — Link. This requires:

motor molecules of dynein, which link adjacent microtubules together, and
the energy of ATP.
Each cilium or flagellum grows out from, and remains attached to, a basal body embedded in the cytoplasm. Basal bodies are identical to centrioles and are, in fact, produced by them.

Last edited by London on Thu Feb 09, 2006 12:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It began 14 years ago and lasted for three years. A simple raised pimple sore to the touch. When FUTZED with ( yes I am a picker) it opened to a concave hole that had little hairlike fibers in it that could be pulled out with a tweezer ( fiber opitics I call those) and it leaked and leaked a plasma type substance.

During my mensas I do get pimples once in a while and this one was NOT the regular pimple.

This lesions started to grow and you could see a line of red under the skin where it would connect to another site that would spring another pimple and even if not touched this would open like someone has sliced it and create another lesions with the same attributes.

I used to call these lines that it followed under the skin.. subcutaneous rivers that whatever it is traveled to get to the new location.

If you get a paper cut and look in it the black fibers are there right along with the blood....very unusual.

If you look into these lesions with a 100X microscope you see what appears to be ..if you clean out your hairbrush and get a pile of hair..bring that down to really really tiny and that is what I see when I look.

After taking a shower and I pumise, i can still get what appears to be a cobweb of of my skin. When going on vacation to Anacortes Washington I showered in a cabin we rented and my entire body peeled off a funny white coat. MY lesions began to heal. I am not sure what was in that water but I wish I could bottle it.

The lesions covered my entire face and I was homebound for two of the three years. Then it went away for 10 years and has been back for 4 years. I had what I called PIZZA FACE for the two of those first three years....it was very hard on my ego.

I have them on my chin and right arm. They seem to pop up along the same lines, elbow, between to the right of my thumb on my right hand and they have eaten all the flesh under the skin and it is indented. My arms are covered in leapord dots of white ( non-pigmented) skin. MY upper arms still have about 10 lesions n them but if I work out and sweat they seem to heal better then not sweating...have not got a clue as to why.

Panafil and Accuzyme works at healing them in about two months versus 6-8 months. When panafil is placed on them at night they leak a white substance for hours.

I have taken Lamasil, Septra, Avelox, Bactrim, Flagyl, Biltricide, and lots of Myacins. I work a 40 hour work week plus another 20 hour work week at another job and I spend a few hours researching a week. So I am much better than 4 years ago when I could barely get out of bed.

If you need to know more PM me. I can also give the girls in the pics you r e-mail address if you want to talk to them.

My 80 year old mom has them covering her back. My location is face, along chin line mostly, and arms. Others have it al over their legs..so it does not have one favorite spot on everyone except that most have it along the jaw line.

Also in the beginning during the first stage if you rub vaselne on your body after a shower most get tons of what appears to be lint coming out of their pores. This is FRIGHTENING when it first happens but everntually you get familiar with it. Then after about two years it stops happening.

Antony van Leeuwenhoek, using a single-lens microscope,14 was intrigued by “animalcules” (little animals) that he saw in his well water. He wanted to know whether they might survive exposure to pepper, so he ground up some and added it to a sample. The number of animalcules waxed and waned until 6 August 1676, when he made a discovery:

" I now saw very plainly that these were little eels, or worms, lying all huddled up together and wriggling; just as if you saw, with the naked eye, a whole tubful of very little eels and water, with the eels a-squirming among one another: and the whole water seemed to be alive with these multifarious animalcules. This was for me, among all the marvels that I have discovered in nature, the most marvellous of all; and I must say, for my part, that no more pleasant sight has ever yet come before my eye than these many thousands of living creatures, seen all alive in a little drop of water, moving among one another, each several creature having its own proper motion".1

He was looking at a spirillum, probably Spirillum volutans, the large bacterium shown in the accompanying sketch. Leeuwenhoek never saw its flagella. Those organelles of locomotion were first seen on Chromatium okenii, another large bacterium, by Christian Ehrenberg in 1836, and later on S. volutans by Ferdinand Cohn in 1872. The subject of bacterial behavior was taken up systematically in the 1880s by the physiologist Theodor Engelmann in Utrecht, and by the botanist Wilhelm Pfeffer in Tübingen. They studied the responses of various species of bacteria to light, oxygen, salts, and a variety of nutrients. Pfeffer, who thought that bacteria could steer toward or away from a chemical source, coined the term “chemotaxis” to describe their attraction or repulsion. The role that flagella play in that response was examined in detail after dark-field condensers of high numerical aperture were developed, beginning in 1909 with work done by Karl Reichert and culminating in 1920 with the work of Paul Metzner, who described the motion of flagellar bundles of S. volutans in stunning detail.15

S. volutans has two flagellar bundles (as shown in the sketch), each composed of about 25 flagellar filaments. Here, the cell is swimming from left to right. Its body is helical. The bundle on the left is in the tail configuration; the one on the right is in the head configuration. When the filaments change their directions of rotation, the bundles switch their configurations and the cell moves in the opposite direction. An Escherichia coli bacterium is shown below the S. volutans for comparison. As many as six flagellar filaments arise at random from the sides of the E. coli cell and form a bundle that appears near one pole. Rotation of the filaments in the bundle pushes the cell forward. When the bundle changes its orientation, the cell goes off in a new direction.

Although the change in angle generated by a tumble is approximately random, there is a slight forward bias. When, by chance, a cell moves up a spatial gradient of a chemical attractant or down a spatial gradient of a chemical repellent, runs are extended. When, by chance, it moves the other way, runs revert to the length observed in the absence of a gradient. Thus, the bias in the random walk that enables cells to move up or down gradients is positive.

Finally, the behavioral response is temporal, not spatial. E. coli does not determine whether there is more attractant, say, in front than behind; rather, it determines whether the concentration increases when it moves in a particular direction. Studies of impulsive stimuli indicate that a cell compares the concentration observed over the past 1 s with the concentration observed over the previous 3 s and responds to the difference.5

Constraints imposed by physics
Look again at the runs in figure 3. They are not quite straight. The cell is subject to rotational Brownian movement that causes it to wander off course by about 30° in 1 s. After about 10 s, it drifts off course by more than 90° and “forgets” the direction in which it was going. This makes earlier measurements irrelevant and sets an upper limit on the time that the cell has to decide whether life is getting better or worse. A lower limit is set by the time required for the cell to count enough molecules of attractant or repellent to determine their concentration with adequate precision. The number of receptors required for this task proves to be remarkably small, because diffusion of the molecules to be sensed enables them to be sampled by different points on the surface of the cell with great efficiency.6

thanx skytroll
but my "fibers"
are not alive
and most of them (note i said MOST of them)
likely are clothing fibers of which I have an allergic reaction to.

About e-coli

does that not mutate all the time anyway?

I have to say all the bio talk only just scares me more. I almoat died from sepsis.
But I fail to see any connection
except that having survived has weakened my
immune system.
like people with aids.
they are more prone to getting other things. That is what I think. not that any one is listening in this thread. I am not a micro-biologist or any kind of biologist. but I do have a brain and I would appreciate it if some folks could translate their info if its not to inconvenient, to simple talk (the kind you would use with a patient)
thanx

PS; i hope i did not insult any one. Did not mean to.

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these".

Last edited by Linn on Fri Feb 10, 2006 4:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these".

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these".

The flagellar motor is energized by proton motive force, and torque is generated by electrostatic interactions at the rotor/stator (FliG/MotA-MotB) interface. Like the Escherichia coli flagellar motor that switches between counterclockwise and clockwise rotation, the S. meliloti rotary motor depends on electrostatic interactions between conserved charged residues, namely, Arg294 and Glu302 (FliG) and Arg90, Glu98 and Glu150 (MotA). Unlike in E. coli, however, Glu150 is essential for torque generation, whereas residues Arg90 and Glu98 are crucial for the chemotaxis-controlled variation of rotary speed.

Hi London,
No, I never worked with any scientist, I barely understand science (my own fault, I refused to learn), although I am now catching up from necessity, and thanks to your wonderful posts, and those of others on this site.
I would dearly love to know more about any warehouse. I don't have a laptop, and I don't know what you mean by one of 'those' laptops, as my grasp of technology is very poor. I am not even au fait with how to answer a PM, so this is why I have not done so to anyone yet. I am frightened of inadvertently sending everyone a confidential answer.

The present invention pertains to methods for cloning animals. In particular, the invention includes methods of cloning an animal by combining a genome from an activated donor cell with an activated enucleated oocyte to thereby obtain a nuclear transfer embryo, and impregnating an animal with the nuclear transfer embryo in conditions suitable for gestation of a cloned animal. The invention further relates to methods of chemically enucleating an oocyte having a meiotic spindleapparatus by exposing the oocyte with a compound that destabilizes the meiotic spindleapparatus.